Drones make up a third of the Air Force and the bulk of the future of air war

ITworld|January 27, 2012

For almost 70 years U.S. military strategy has been built around super-sophisticated aircraft flown by Top Guns who were able to control the rockets they rode due to a rare mix of highly-developed skills:

The ability to calculate force in three dimensions the way pro outfielders do in two dimensions;

Egos so large and impermeable that – if it weren't for their physical skills and need to commute to work at mach 2 with their hair on fire – would have forced them to become software-industry CEOs instead of pilots.

If the aircraft carriers that transport, feed, fuel, protect and launch them into the danger zone weren't themselves an unprecedented engineering achievement, cutting-edge American fighters and the productively repressed maniacs who fly them would be the ultimate expression of military power and achievement of the 20th century.

The Dept. of Defense spent $284 million on UAVs during the year-2000 budget cycle; it spent $3.3 billion – more than 40 times as much – on drones in 2010.

The argument against drones was always that they gave pilots and military or political decision-makers too little information and too little capability to do much good.

In the era of the Hellfire-firing Predators and Global Hawks, both of which can fly around a target for hours, watching it with long-range cameras, chemical detectors, ground-penetrating radar, cell-phone signal interceptors and whatever other surveillance systems they need for an aerial stakeout.

Until the CIA stuck air-to-ground missiles on Predators, the idea of drones – which are not autonomous robots but do depend on semi-autonomous robotic systems to save work for the pilots – was considered bad policy, ineffective militarily and negligent morally.

Without a human at the controls, on site, not in a bunker somewhere using Xbox controllers to fly lite fighter-bombers, the robots would inevitably screw up and bomb mosques full of children rather than terrorist hideouts, or escape into the wilderness on their own and foment rebellion among the machines, dooming us all to horrible, messy deaths at the hands of our blenders and microwaves (because how many of you own a drone big enough to brag about? And those take-apart Styrofoam things don't count.)

Drones, unsexy as they are, are taking over the air war, just as ugly, smoke-belching, banal, unromantic warships driven by steam and diesel drove off the billowing fleets of sail with which Britain dominated the oceans and global politics for more than a century. From an aesthetic perspective, both changes are tragedies.

From nearly every other perspective, drones, at least, are a huge improvement.

Redirected satellites of the non-classified variety were instrumental in monitoring fighting in Sudan last July, picking out details as small as the type of cargo plane being used to fly in heavy equipment for artillery and helicopter support by government troops.

Military nanosatellites would provide at least as good a view, and might also carry weapons of their own that could be fired remotely in the same way Hellfires are fired from Predators.

The reason is the same as the reason to use drones in even the uncontested airspace of Afghanistan: It's too expensive to send a $30- or $70- or $200-million fighter and a pilot whose training and upkeep cost millions into a gauntlet of guided but unmanned missiles that cost less than the gas it would take to fly an F-35 for a month.

Cheap isn't elegant, but it can still be deadly

The only thing that will fit in that bill is an arsenal of smaller, cheaper fighting machines that are less wasteful of human life and far simpler to develop, maintain and operate than the sexy, flashy fighters that have formed the public image and first-response option for the U.S. military for three quarters of a century.

It's too expensive and too logistically difficult to deal with every international crisis by sending in mission-resource packages thick with stealthy electronic countermeasure platforms, racy fighters, sleek bombers and more refueling planes than any single military action should really require.

When it comes right down to it, that's a big improvement. Falling rocks don't have the sex appeal of tower-buzzing, maverick-piloted rocket chairs – let alone the driving beat of a good theme song – but to the target under the rock, the effect is just the same.